Glory or scurvy awaits!

Last day where I can buy vegetables and I'm cooking a roast tonight to use up the last of everything in the house. It's a little bit worrying, as the garden is yet to conclusively be providing. I see salads in my future, as the lettuces are the only things producing reliably.

Windowsill lettuce! You are my only friend.

There is the promise of carrots, but I've had the promise of carrots before, only to discover that the massive great green heads are there because no energy has gone into growing the tasty orange bit. I'll be pulling them up tomorrow to either be elated at the bounties of the eart or distraught at the prospect of a month of pasta bakes and rice-based meals served with needle-thin carrottettes.

Schrodinger's Carrots - the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until it is pulled from the earth by its green leafy tops

Aside from that*, I'm vegetableless. The cauliflowers and cabbages haven't grown as quickly as expected and the mangetout that should be producing now is instead recovering from being mostly eaten by slugs. This month, I are to be mostly eating carrots.

I did have a few tempting thoughts of delaying the challenge for another month, or even calling the whole thing off with some comments about how silly I was being. However, I've put quite a bit of work and planning into this and I refuse to be thwarted in the first month. Needle-thin carrots for dinner it is, every night!

On the bright side, the new daylight bulb and reflector is working great. Due to the dim weather of late, the latest set of seedlings has been pretty much solely under artificial light and they're doing great. Much better than under the old system.

This is especially important as these are swedes for Oct/Nov, purple sprouting broccoli for Feb/Apr, chard for Nov-Jan, and kale and spinach for Jan-May. And pumpkins, just cause I can. Basically, this is the seed tray to make sure I'm not suffering from deficiency diseases** at the start of next year, even if I will be a bit tired of leafy green winter vegetables.

I'm off to go cook my last broccoli for 2 months and my last parsnips for 4 months and I guess we'll see the state of the carrots tomorrow. Wish me luck.

PJW

*Well, there's some new potatoes that won't get used tonight, which is kinda cheating, but I'm not going to throw them away on an arbitrary rule!
** On a side note, my daughter's food will be separate from this challenge if I do run short of vegetables!

Mid-May update

I love this bit of the year. I think the best way to demonstrate that is with three photos:

January

Start of May

Today and the great wall of potatoes

Everything is growing, some of it is even outgrowing the things that are trying to eat it, and I feel like I might not starve next month when the moratorium on shop-bought vegetables kicks in.

One thing which hasn't gone to plan is cauliflower. Under the original plan, May's vegetables were supposed to be cauliflower, cabbage and carrots that were planted back in January. This has turned out to be grotesquely over-optimistic and mostly constructed from how long it took to get vegetables last year from pre-bought seedlings, rather than this year's growing completely from seed. I think next year's May will rely a lot more on vegetables frozen over the winter than I expected.

Anyway, the carrots are good, the cabbage has bounced back, but the cauliflower has proven to be both fiddly and utterly delicious to whatever's eating my crops (and exading all slug pellets, cloches, barriers, nets, anything to still eat at its whim. But that's another post for another day). So, I've decided to cheat.

George's Marvellous Medicine in full effect!

Since I do want to actually eat some cauliflower this year, and some of the beds that currently have cauliflowers are due to be replanted in July/August with purple sprouting broccoli and winter and spring cauliflower, I made the decision to ditch some of the less promising home-grown seedlings and replace them with fully grown plantlings from the local garden centre. I can thoroughly recommend this route to anyone else who fancies growing some brassica and is starting late in the year/can't be bothered with seeds - £3 gets you 9 big plantlings which are all likely to turn into real plants.

Everything apart from the cauliflower is going great guns though. Here are the broccoli and a cabbage at the back.

These are all home-grown, which I think demonstrates just how much of a slacker that cauliflower above was being. Rubbish.

And the fruits are looking promising too. There are 9 figs ripening, the pear tree is covered in little pearlets, the strawberries are pocked with little white flowers, the raspberries and loganberries are shooting up and even the grape vine is considering the possibility of grapes. Nothing major from the cherry, plum, blackberry, gooseberry or blueberries yet, but it is the first year for all of them so we make allowances.

Hopefully next month should be all about the harvesting!

PJW

Artificial sun, mk 2

About a month ago, I decided to adjust the reflector on my seedling sunlamp just a tiny little bit. Unfortunately, as you may recall, the reflector's build quality was typical of my construction work and was held together by sellotape, blu-tac, inertia and prayer.

The inevitable happened and I just managed to catch all the pieces before they destroyed my latest set of seedlings. Thankfully, my baby daughter was in bed at the time or she would've learned several new and interesting words.

It was at this point that my wife decided it was cruel to let me struggle on alone and offered her expertise. She designed and built for me this magnificient creation:

I don't think it looks that much sturdier than mine, do you?

Instead of being built from cardboard, wire and sellotape, this setup is built from hardboard, square dowel and metal fixings to hold it all together. More importantly, the reflector itself is supported from a base on the floor, rather than the previous method of having everything attached to the light fixture and creating a single point of failure.

So, this brand new and improved reflector was created, and that was of course the signal for the bulb to break. Massively annoying; it didn't even have the decency to break in some devastating fashion - the pin broke on the bayonet fitting. It still works, but it won't stay in the socket anymore.

However, that was the excuse I needed to buy another and buy bigger. The new bulb is 105W and kicks out 6800 lumen rather than the paltry 4300 lumen of the old one.

In laymans terms, it's gone from "Ow that hurts," to "AGGGHHH!" if you look directly into it.

Unfortunately, the month-long gap has not been kind to my seedlings. The best windowsill I have is still not particularly bright, as we're semi-detached and the south side of our house is the adjoining wall to the next one.

Up == Light, right? The carrots told us that was right.

The current seed tray is replacement cauliflowers for those lost, chard, tomatoes, peppers and a rather optimistic attempt at growing a globe artichoke plant from seed. None of them are particularly irreplaceable, but I'm really hoping that I don't have to start again.

With any luck, the extra power will be enough to rescue these ones and I can look at moving them outside next weekend.

PJW

Murdering pests

I've come to the conclusion that it's been slugs and ground-based creatures eating away at my crops - while I haven't caught any at it, some of my crops inside the vegetable cages and under cloches have been eaten, which rules out cats, birds and anything else that wouldn't already be present in the soil. Current best theory is slug eggs and overwintering caterpillars in the compost, which enables them to pop up under cloches.

I'm adopting several plans of attack. The first is to cover the area with non-toxic slug pellets, which double as poison and an alternative food source. The second is to go with preventative measures on really vulnerable plants; I've replanted the mange tout with woollen pellets covering the soil which apparently slugs don't like going over and I've attached copper tape around the side of the pot, which reacts with the slime on their foot to produce electricity.

Burn, you insufferably terse dullards!

One of my esteemed commenters and good friends suggested crushed egg shells on the soil and even kindly offered me a jar that she'd prepared earlier. I turned her down in favour of the wool pellets - while I plan on eggshelling around my spinach, I don't think there are enough eggs in the whole city to evenly cover my expanding vegetable beds and a jar's worth wouldn't even get me a sixth of the way round the garden.

The first two methods of pellets and protection are good, but they lack something. You can tell they've worked because your plants are still alive, but they don't have that special sense of vengeance that I'm looking for. I want corpses that can be used to warn others of the perils of raiding my vegetable garden.

I want to see their heads mounted on a spike outside the house, so I can wave at them, like this. Can you arrange that for me?

Beer in a pot is a time-honoured way of murdering slugs and it's given a little high level of professionalism by a Christmas gift from my brother-in-law-in-law-in-waiting.

 The fiance of my wife's sister, in case you were wondering.

I don't know how much they cost, but I may need to get some more - the lid give protection from the elements and it's designed just right to give the little gits the feeling that they're coming in for a shady snack before finding out that it's actually their doom. Only problem I can foresee with them is the cost of changing the beer - does anyone know how often it needs to be done? Those two traps used up one can of Sainsburys basics lager and while the stuff is only £1 a go, if it needs to be changed every week, it'll add up.

PJW

Nasty little biting things

Everything was going so well...

Before

After. Oh, the huge manatee.

I was completely unprepared for this. Those poor little ravaged plants are/were mangetout, which are pretty hardy and not usually the first choice of pests. I've also had a few runner beans utterly stripped of all greenery and they normally grow faster than they can be eaten.

No, that's not a twig in front of the bamboo cane, it's a corpse

Last year, nothing touched my beans, probably because of the abundance of easy targets elsewhere in the garden. This year the big beds where brassica grow are protected with semi-permanent vegetable net cages and I think it's just deflected the attention onto my other plants.

Annoyingly enough, the nasturtium that I'm deliberately growing as sacrificial plants? Completely untouched. Choosy little bastards.

The annoying thing is that I have no idea what's doing it. It's too cold for butterflies and the very hungry thieving fucktards caterpillars that come with them, none of my slug pellets have been touched so I don't think it's slugs (and they'd've eaten the stalk and all, rather than just stripping the leaves) and while I hate the cats, it doesn't seem like their style. Birds, maybe? Any ideas from the audience?

Because of this, I'm not sure of my options. Without knowing what's eating them, I can't plant companion plants to drive them away/provide an alternative food source that I don't care about. I don't have the patience to deal with netting across the whole garden and if it's small bugs, that won't do any good. The other alternative is to just keep planting in bulk, accept some wastage and try and get enough seedlings to adult plants to fill all the holes in the garden.

Plan C would be pesticides and I really don't want to resort to that again. I did last year, as I was furious with losing all of my cauliflower and cabbage to the depredations of the world's worst children's storybook character, but it accomplished nothing in terms of saving my plants and almost certainly did horrible things to the local bee and pollinator population.

After he'd finished eating 1 apple, 2 pears, 3 plums, 4 strawberries, 5 oranges and 1 green leaf, the Very Hungry Caterpillar felt quite ill. Do you know why that is darling? Because Daddy sprayed him thoroughly with Thiacloprid! It was too late to save Daddy's vegetables, of course, they were quite dead; but Daddy was buggered if he was going to let the little fucker live to enjoy his spoils. And that's why we have no more butterflies, no more bees and no more food in the world. Now, off to bed with you. Night night!

I value my morals and my views on sustainability, but it's really hard not to say, "Fuck it, it's only one garden; how much difference will it make?" when you keep coming outside to see your hard work has been utterly killed to feed something else.

Anyone got any bright ideas?

PJW

April Update

Spring is sprung, in sort of a damp way, and the garden is thriving. I have nascent figs on my fig tree, the grape vines have come back to life and all around the garden, things are sprouting that I intended to sprout. I love this time of year - I'm always shocked that things are doing what they're supposed to and the miracle of food from the ground might be likely to happen again.

Not pictured - all the things that've been eaten by slugs/birds already.

One thing which hasn't gone to plan is to start relying solely on my own produce from May, which was part of the original terms of the challenge. The plan was to plant seedlings early and use the sunlamp to give them a headstart, which hasn't worked as well as I would've liked. I hoped for cabbage and carrots to tide me over, but the January carrots are very spindly still and the cabbages are still more promise than reality and while we could survive by just not eating any vegetables for a month and having loads of pasta, I feel that would be somewhat against the spirit of the rules!

Next May, I will have the overwintered cabbages, carrots, cauliflower and kale to feed us with, as well as a freezer's full of stored veg, so I've decided to push the challenge back to run from June to June instead.

That looks a lot more likely to happen - the first set of seedlings that I grew have mostly survived the transfer into the ground. I started with 3 broccoli, 3 cabbages, 7 cauliflowers and 3 brussels sprouts. Of those, only 3 cauliflowers and 1 brussels are pronounced dead yet, which is a pretty good hit rate for me.

If anyone's playing along at home, the best advice I ever received was to use bell cloches to protect vulnerable seedlings - these are basically miniature greenhouses which you place over the seedling so that light can get in, but cold winds and predators can't get in until the plant is big enough to look after itself. I've managed to make my own, shockingly enough out of empty Diet Coke bottles and they're doing a really good job of keeping my future meals alive.

A surviving cauliflower

The next exciting stage is when they stop looking like leafy things that may or may not die and start looking like miniature food. Hopefully, that'll be in the next few weeks.

PJW

Good use of time

I took today off work as holiday in order to relax and destress. Life has been busy of late and I thought a nice peaceful day of not doing very much would be just what was needed to recover a little bit of energy.

Today, I:

• Bought 450l (£24 worth) of garden compost
• Built a vertical garden and planted herbs and strawberries in it
• Bought and planted a cherry tree
• Bought and planted a rhubarb crown
• Replanted a loganberry bush
• Planted 30 early seed potatoes
• Planted some jerusalem artichokes
• Rearranged things so I could grow beetroot and then planted them
• Dug in the rest of the green manure on the brassica beds and then put a new layer of compost on top
• Realised that I'd used 450l (£24 worth) of garden compost in one day
• Covered all the earth round the fruit bushes in bark chips
• Planted another seed tray full of vegetables
• Squeezed said seed tray under the sun lamp and built some extra reflectors
• Lay down and may not ever rise again.

So yes, nice, quiet, relaxing, peaceful day of not doing very much. Granted, I now feel quite good about how the garden's progressing. While the sun's still going down at 6pm, it's well-nigh impossible to accomplish anything after a day at work and my weekends are busy for the next fortnight, so I was a little bit worried about the pile of jobs that might've stacked up in the meantime.

I was going to write about the vertical garden today, but I'm so knackered that I think that will have to wait for another day. Early to bed and hope to survive the rest of the working week.

PJW

Magical growing things

I love the first seedlings of the season. It's always amazing to me that any of my seeds come up at all; it still seems like magic to put a little ball into dirt and have that turn into a real live growing thing.

The carrots have developed a distinct sideways slant after having been kicked out from the sweet spot under the light by my new treasures. Sod them - they can grow or not, whatever. I've got cabbages on the go now!

Hopefully not how I'll treat my daughter if we ever make her a sibling.

That's like a real plant now. And it's not dead from lack of light. Go improvised sunlamp!

I now have all four cabbage seedlings growing, which is annoying cause the plan only called for two from this batch; I only planted four on the expectation that they wouldn't all come up. On the down side, only one of the six cauliflowers is showing its head and neither of the lettuces. This could be just a quirk of the seeds and the others will be up in a couple of days. It could also be that those seed packets are compromised and I need to get some more. Hard to tell and if I leave it too long then I won't be able to harvest for May, which will apparently be when I'll be eating nothing but cabbage.

I'll be planting the next batch of seeds tomorrow anyway and hopefully I'll get some more cauliflower from this batch.

PJW

More preparations and first sowings

The best news of the week is that the indoor carrots are not only surviving, but thriving.

Live! LIIIIIIVVVE!!!

All the sprouts are now pointing straight up, as opposed to desperately lunging sideways towards the window for sunlight. That suggests that the sunshine lamp is performing as planned, which means two successful experiments in one. Plus, the possibility of tasty early carrots, which is kinda the aim of the game.

Buoyed by the fact that the rain and wind have eased off somewhat and so we're unlikely to need to gather up two of every animal in the near future, I've spent most of the weekend preparing for the new growing season.

The garden is structured around four main 1.25m² growing beds, which will be used for brassica (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc) this year which need a lot of nitrogen for the leafy growth. I could have just piled a tonne of artificial fertiliser on, but I found out about green manure last winter and thought I'd give it a go. Green manure is a winter-growing crop that covers the ground, suppresses weeds and takes nitrogen out of the air and fixes it in the ground for the next year. Once winter is done, you chop it down, dig it into the ground and it provides the nutrients for the next year's crop.

Bit cruel when you think about it - a crop that you raise for the sole purpose of killing it and mutilating its body.

Incidentally, if anyone is going to be doing any gardening that involves weeding amongst plants or features, I can thoroughly recommend acquiring a Dutch Hoe. One of my father's mottos when it comes to DIY is that it's always best to take the time to get the right tool for the job, instead of trying to bodge it with the almost-right tool, as you'll just end up having to get the right tool later after wasting a load of time. The same appears true in gardening. Weeding those field beans would've taken me a half hour with a trowel, yet took three minutes with a hoe.

In terms of things to put in those beds, the first seeds of the season have been sown and are sitting atop the boiler. First up are early cauliflowers and cabbage, which should in theory be ready for May, when the no-buying-of-vegetables-for-a-calendar-year challenge* begins.

 I bought special plant labels this year. They're made of slate and you write on them with a wax pen that will only come off with white spirit. The idea is that they're impervious to water, which makes them perfect for being outside. Not quite so good for the idiot who doesn't have any white spirit in the house and requires three attempts to draw the diagram on. Thank god I was only doing one.

I had a couple of spaces in the seed tray which I've filled with lettuce for my next project - vertical gardening.

PJW

*Needs a better name.